Many small business owners find it easy to pay using their personal credit cards during the initial stages of their businesses. While there’s nothing wrong with paying for stuff from your own checking account or personal credit cards when your business is still young, you’ll get to appreciate numerous benefits associated with using a business credit card. Indeed, with budding of new business opportunities, there has equally been a growing popularity of small business credit cards. If effectively managed, especially during these times of ever changing interest rates, a business card can be an important tool for any small business owner. Here are some of the benefits of using a business credit card.

Avoids Mixing up Other Accounts

Using a credit card dedicated to your small business helps to avoid mixing your business account with your personal accounts. You don’t want your business to have accounting or tax problems and this is indeed a good way to prove to Internal Revenue Service that you are committed in the management of your business accounts.

Tracking your Business Expenses

Using business credit cards gives small business owners a better way of tracking their expenses. You don’t want a situation where it comes to year end and you can’t reconcile your transactions. At the end of the year, your credit card company will provide you with a summary of a well itemized statement of all your transactions, averting the nightmare of saving your receipts for tax time.

Accessing Business Loans

Use of a business credit card helps your small business to build trust and increase credibility. A well built business credit makes it easy for banks to go through your account and advance you the money you may need for business expansion.

Separation of Business Credit and Personal Credit

The other good thing about using small business credit cards is that your business credit is rated differently and your business transactions do not have any bearing on your personal credit ratings.

Building Special Rewards

Following high competition in credit card market, many credit cards have developed different rewards and discount programs. These include programs such as business and supply discounts, cash back on all purchases or airline miles among others.

Developing Employee relationship

If you have employed some staff and you allow them to use your business credit cards, you develop a good relationship with your workers as that increases the level of trust between you and them. You may want to be covered by employee misuse insurance for protection against misuse of business finances.

Limiting Employee Spending

Using small business credit card gives you the ability to control how much your workers can spend on business purchases. You can simply do this by giving them cards with preset limits and monitor their spending separately using the statements you receive.

In a nutshell, using small business credit cards presents great benefits to business owners, helping them to streamline their operations, control business spending, increase efficiency of transactions as well as enhancing fraud protection. If you’ve not been using a credit card for your small business operations, then there is a worthy cause to start doing so.

Home based businesses have been on the rise and many people have embraced them as a profitable and convenient way of making a living. But financing such enterprises can be a little challenging, especially when one doesn’t know how to go about it. The good news, however, is that lending to home businesses has increased rapidly and many home based businesses owners have been able to secure advance loans for their businesses.

There are many home based business lenders out there who are willing to finance small businesses, and home based business owners who wouldn’t for one reason or another qualify to obtain loan from traditional financial institutions.

Kabbage Inc

Kabbage Inc. is one of the leading home based business lenders and they also give cash advance loans to business owners selling products online. In their report released earlier in 2013, Kabbage Inc. said they paid more than $200 million in annualized cash to over 100,000 small business owners. This was an increase from the estimated $15 million cash paid in the previous year. Kabbage mainly lends to home office businesses such as those that sell merchandise on online stores like eBay, Amazon among others.

Accion

Accion is another leading home based business lender. This is a microfinance organization specialized in lending small business, from $500 and up to $50,000. They also offer credit and business advice to small business owners who may not be able to obtain traditional financing.

Accion however doesn’t give credit to businesses dealing with real estate, money lending, multi-level or network marketing programs, weapon sales, illegal or polluting and other related activities.

One of the best resources with up-to date information about home based lenders is Small Business Administration – a government website with the detailed information about running small and home based businesses.

Before you approach your potential lender for financing, there are a number of things you’d need to consider. Among other things you should have a long term plan on how you intend to run and succeed in your business, your form of collateral and so on. Make sure you also have a good credit report.

Convincing Your Potential Lender

One of the things your potential lender would want to know before financing you is whether your business can endure through the tough competition in the market. You should therefore know your business well in terms of strengths, weaknesses, risks and opportunities and be ready to convince your lender how you intend to deal with any challenges.

A Business Plan – having an impressive business plan enables the financier to weigh whether you have a good scope of marketing study and your business projections. In your plan you should make sure all these are well spelt out as there’s no lender who’d risk approving financing without first reviewing your plan.

Family, Friends and Partnership

If for any reason you are not able to obtain credit from banks or micro finance organizations, you can alternatively ask your family or friends to finance your business. Further you can also seek potential business partners who may wish to invest in your business. If they look at your business plan and are willing to commit themselves then you can consider your financing need as resolved.

I was reading the latest list of top 500 franchise by Businessweek and I noticed the best and most profitable niches had one thing in common; They required large amount of start up capital. These business required investment in personnel, expensive inventories, machinery and equipment.

Given the fact that most of us are not blessed with a trust fund to give us a leg up in life, starting a business usually demands a large investment of capital. Looking at such a list it is easy to despair for lack of low cost opportunities.

Worry not….

Home Based Business Ideas that Require Brain Power Over Money

In order to start and grow a small home based business with the potential for growth, we need to look at new business models that allow us to begin an operation with more brain power than money.

If you are among the many opportunity seekers trying to find a way to build a truly profitable home based business from scratch, your best bet is setting up your business online

The internet allows you to work from home and yet build a corporate-like image with little or no money, and you will not have the need for, physical locations and other expenses that usually choke many a beginner business owner.

Some ideas suited for internet are business idea focused on offering professional services e.g Graphic design, Accountancy, publisher etc. The internet has enable people to sell products without the need of handling payment, warehousing and shipping. Websites like clickbank give you opportunity to sell digital products and make money: Your job is to promote the product and they will store and ship the product to the client.

How you get started with zero start up capital

With internet, you can get a free website from wordpress.com, free email address from Yahoo and Google and even free tools from twitter and facebook to help you find potential customers. If you want to promote products by companies like Amazon.com, Clickbank and Google, they don’t require you to buy expensive inventories. You just register for free and you are ready to go.

The unique set up by these internet giants have enabled new age entrepreneurs to take full advantage of the power of internet, thus enabling you to efficiently run a huge operation all by yourself without the need for employees and other usually heavy expenses associated with the traditional business model.

Since the internet begun, thousands if not millions of entrepreneurs have started their journey in building a home based business online. The start up capital can be as low as $400 or less, and trust me, that small investment can slowly grow into a several thousands of dollars business if you work smart and hard enough.